[arch-general] Installing Arch Linux w/ RAID

Carlos Williams carloswill at gmail.com
Mon Oct 26 09:26:55 EDT 2009


I have been struggling with successfully installing Arch Linux on my
PC with just two S-ATA drives. I am using the LiveCD / Netinst
"2009.08". The only partition I want for RAID is simply /home. I have
two identical disks and am partition as follows:

/dev/sda1 = 2048 (bootable) */boot*
/dev/sda2 = 40960 */*
/dev/sda3 = 102400 *RAID*

/dev/sdb1 = 2048 *Swap*
/dev/sdb2 = 40960 */var*
/dev/sdb3 = 102400 *RAID*

Then I create the RAID after I run "cfdisk" utility:

mdadm --create --verbose /dev/md0 --level=1 --raid-devices=2 /dev/sda3 /dev/sdb3

Once that is done, I run "/arch/setup command from the comand prompt
and enter the system installer as normal. I have simply already
created my disks, all I do from the installer now is assign a file
system and mount point. It recognizes the RAID /dev/md0 partition I
created using mdadm utility. Everything is fine but when I install
Grub on /dev/sda and reboot the machine, I always fail to boot. I get
some strange error that tells me to type "Control-D" for maintenance
mode or something like that. If I do everything like I did above but
don't create a RAID partition, Arch installs perfect!

What am I doing wrong? The Arch Wiki is not helping me at all. I have
spent a week trying to follow the Wiki with help from the forums and
to no avail I have given up. I can't see this being that hard. I think
I bork something up when I install Grub but I get no errors and it
tells me I installed Grub successfully on /dev/sda.

http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=80776

Thanks for any help in getting me a working Arch Linux system with RAID.


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